Throughout this election year, many of us have been exercising our rights to engage in free and open discourse and debate as we considered the trajectory of our nation and how our governmental leaders help shape that trajectory. As I reflect on the debates that happened nationally, locally, and within my own community, I find myself thinking deeply about the ways we can teach our students to engage in rich, vibrant conversations and the achieve skills necessary to make those conversations successful.
Envisioning Success
The most effective student discussions I’ve experienced or witnessed are those where students are deeply and passionately discussing a topic related to the content they’re studying. They are politely agreeing, disagreeing, and backing up their ideas with evidence. They are asking more creative, deeper questions than what were originally plotted on the lesson plan. They are enthusiastic to share their ideas and bummed when class is over. And what is the teacher doing? Mostly sitting quietly, taking notes as the conversation unfolds, only occasionally chiming in with a clarifying question or a soft steering of the conversation.
To me, one of the best ways to assess how well students have grasped the content in your classroom is to turn them loose to discuss what they’ve learned and to let them lead the conversation. Deep, passionate, accurate conversations about our subject matter with the teacher merely serving as a guide rail is an aim I am always striving for during the school year. It is my measure of how well I’ve prepared my students to navigate my subject matter and how well I’ve prepared them for life after they leave school.
Building Conversational Skills
Getting to this place isn’t always so easy, I’ve learned. The conversation skills we use every day as adults are just that: skills. They must be explicitly taught. The idea of spending time teaching my students how to engage in productive, academic conversations was a big epiphany I had a few years ago, and since then, I’ve been reading and thinking about the best process for building this unique set of skills with my students.
Fortunately for all of us, “Speaking and Listening” skills make their presence felt quite strongly in the Common Core State Standards, and in many other states’ standards as well. This definitely empowered me to explore what it means to spend time teaching these critical skills. Both in my own classroom and the classrooms of teachers I coached, I discovered two important factors in teaching academic conversation skills:
1. Begin with the end in mind
2. Develop a comprehensive scope and sequence
Beginning With the End in Mind
Just like any other skill or concept you teach, conversational skills can be assessed. I find it most effective to assess these skills on a rubric. As you build your rubric, envision your students having the most effective, productive conversation about your subject area. What are they doing? What aren’t they doing? What would it look like to pull yourself entirely from the conversation? Some common rubric components I tend to recommend include:
- Using academic language
- Staying focused on the subject
- Supporting claim with evidence
- Following rules of discourse
- Using formal style and appropriate voice
- Building on others’ ideas
There are many other factors you might consider, and of course, the age of your students may factor into which components you feel are most integral to an effective conversation. Let your state standards help drive these decisions as well.
Once I have created my rubric, I always find it most effective to review it with students, discussing specifically what each component means and considering what it looks like when properly executed. It’s also a best practice to have students use the rubric at the end of a conversation to self- and peer-assess.
Building a Conversation Skill Scope and Sequence
Surprisingly, for many years I had never thought about building a conversational skill scope and sequence, as I did for the other skills and concepts I was teaching in my classroom. Once I put this practice into place, speaking and listening skills became more than an afterthought in my unit and lesson planning. They became an integral part of what I was teaching, and I found that the students were more deeply engaged in the core content as a result. It leveraged what we all know about teenagers—they like to talk to each other! Getting them talking about our subject area was an easy transition, once I had carefully plotted out how to build their skills in this area. A high-level view of a conversation scope and sequence might look something like this:
- Students speak at appropriate volume and in complete sentences
- Students use academic language when speaking
- Students speak directly to each other
- Students respond to each others’ thoughts and ideas
- Students use evidence to support their claims
- Students ask their own questions about the content
Removing Yourself from the Conversation
This is probably the hardest part of the process. Most of us became teachers because we are passionate about our subject area and we are very enthusiastic about sharing our knowledge with our students. Creating the best learning experience for students, though, means that we need to restrain our natural urge to participate in the conversation and build toward the vision of students fully leading the conversation.
I have found it helpful to restrain my own conversation contributions to give myself the task of tracking student conversations real-time on the conversation rubric. I will still chime in to redirect a conversation that is veering off-topic or to change the topic if there’s specific content I want the class to cover, but other than that, I let my students do the steering. As you engage in student-led discussions, metacognitively reflect after each class: how much did I contribute to the conversation and how can I step back from the conversation even more next time?
Related Readings to Learn More
The following greatly informed my thinking in this area and are well worth diving into if you want to build student-led conversations into your own classroom. These books are engaging and provide practical ideas that are easily added into your daily instruction:
- Great Habits, Great Readers: A Practical Guide for K-4 Reading in the Light of Common Core by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo and Aja Settles
Although billed as a book for elementary school educators who are working on teaching the ELA standards, I found this book transformational, and I teach high school! This text taught me that conversation is a skill that can and should be taught, and it provides a strong scope and sequence, along with videos of these skills in practice—always valuable for teachers learning how to incorporate new techniques into their practice.
- Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College by Doug Lemov and Norman Atkins
Many educators already have this book on their bookshelves, but if you’re thinking about adding conversation into the mix, it’s worth re-reading with the lens of setting up a culture and classroom expectations that will support effective conversation. Many of the strategies outlined will set a teacher and students on a positive trajectory toward student-led conversations.
Happy conversing!
Written by:
April Croy
Director of Curricular and Instructional Design
Envision
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